Is Humanity Worth Preserving?

I have placed a lot of emphasis in my writing on the preservation of conscious life as a primary reason behind many of my views. I have cited climate change as the main identifiable threat against the conditions for life as we know it, and I still stand by that, as would countless others. The problem is that I am growing increasingly uncertain that I even consider myself all that invested in combating it for the reasons I claim.

I see immense value in human life primarily because I am able to recognize myself as belonging to this category. I can also recognize that any justification I can make for humanity’s prolonged existence can only really be made to other humans. I can make no arguments for my own preservation to a dog or what have you, at least not if I expect any kind of response or appropriate understanding of what it is I am attempting to communicate. I am a human, a part of a species which has managed to identify itself as such, and which has the seemingly unique perspective of more directly undertaking the primary biological objective of simply surviving. We can understand our place as biological creatures whose evolutionary will is fueled by survival and this allows us to take premeditated action to ensure we meet goals which will hopefully ensure our survival. So for this reason, I am more or less invested in the survival of humanity.

But the problem lies in how easily I may deny the value in human life. I may reasonably come to the conclusion that the consciousness we seem to value so highly is a mistake in some way, one which causes us no small amount of distress as we attempt to make sense of what we may discover and how much it contradicts our very nature as a species. Our ability to consciously decide to do things which impedes our survival seems in itself a hazardous ability to have, but I remain uncertain that this one issue might discount all my beliefs regarding the value of life itself. I find myself leaning in the direction of arguing that even if humans are horrifically flawed animals in terms of ensuring our survival, it is still possible to manually direct the evolution, social or otherwise, of more useful habits as a species.

If nothing else, there remains the potential for us to manifest some new form of life from our own activities. I have discussed the matter of creating genuinely complex AI which can function effectively as a human would, free from the restrictions which flesh and blood evolved for life on earth might bring. If synthetic intelligence may utilize kinetics systems designed to operate in the maximum amount of environmental conditions, this might very well allow for the survival of human ideas and experience. And in many ways, it seems to be these very things which many of us identify with most strongly rather than with our genetic makeup itself. Our structure is of little importance to us. A person with a synthetic limb is no less a human than they were before, at least in terms of their consciousness or ability to perceive so long as such perception does not require the particular limb. I share some genetic material with various forms of life, but we have designated some particular difference between all of these forms in order to differentiate them. I am most certainly not an apple, but I am also not a human with blond hair along with the rest of my specific traits. This is the especially interesting detail: just how unique we may be as far as our physical characteristics are concerned. The preservation of ourselves seems almost a result of our endless obsession with experiences in general. It is as though our interest in everything we happen upon fuels us. Perhaps it is that which I am more interested in preserving than the human species itself. It is also possible that I am quite mistaken in much of my understanding of what it is to be human.

I recognize much of the futility of attempting to preserve humanity. Try as we might, there appears to be sufficient reason to expect the universe to eventually cease, regardless of our wishes. And this is fine. It is the result of the physics which allow us to be at all. I suppose there is merit in wishing to reach the end somehow, but such an existence would be inconceivable to me. I cannot begin to imagine the scale of time involved or what it might be like to have such a vast history behind us when something as tiny as the several thousand years we’ve written things down seems almost overwhelming at times. But it might not seem so bad to a human waiting for the death of all things.

For now, though, it seems far more immediately feasible to remain concerned with the scale we can expect to experience and which we can hopefully steer in a course which is more environmentally stable. But what if we are unable? What if we cannot get the entire bulk of humanity on the same page regarding a solution? I suppose that might be a sufficient cause for some despair and some preparations for the worst, but I also suppose we are not quite to that point yet either. This is an incredibly optimistic outlook for someone as pessimistic as I tend to be.

But even if we fail to survive the existential threats that we may face, could we not at least find some value in such an experience before it all ends? Is it not possible for a human to have a truly rich experience at the end of their life despite knowing the outcome? Can this not be the ultimate time of reflection? What exactly would life be like during the remaining years as we slowly witness the countdown to extinction? Never mind our immense capability of wiping ourselves out in a far quicker and far more explosive manner. It is not as though I want to experience such things, but I feel it is necessary to accept that they would be profoundly interesting periods of time quite unlike any other thing I have done. I do not see the continuation of my life itself as a good thing nor do I see it as a bad thing. It is simply my life as it occurs. If it were to continue indefinitely, this would not be good or bad until I made the judgment myself. And someone else might form their own opinion on the matter just as easily which might differ in every way from my own.

I seem to have more questions than answers, but such is the nature of these sorts of things. The answers tend to come far too late to be of any real use to the people affected. The benefit of historical knowledge is immense, but it is outside of our means to experience history from the perspective of the future.

Catching Up After a Couple Weeks of Silence

I have allowed myself a bit of time to reflect on many of my views toward those who favor myths as sufficient explanations for natural phenomena, particularly those who call for the establishment of governmental systems which use such views as a basis for law. I have realized that in many ways, a great deal of my anger, while perhaps justified at times, has been thrown carelessly in wasteful trajectories. I have directed my anger toward those who merely practice such behavior rather than exclusively at those who would force the practice of such behavior on others. And while I think my intentions have been to focus my attention on such individuals and groups, I have managed to inadvertently allow myself to impose this trait on many who are otherwise politically benign in the grand scheme of things.

Nevertheless, I do still find myself with many enemies. I can find no reasonable cause to excuse them, although I may perhaps find enough reason to temporarily pay them no mind, if only for my own sanity. My issue is not primarily with religious or otherwise superstitious views, but with especially shaky foundations for any beliefs. And I find myself constantly at odds with many conservatives because of their frequently poor reasoning behind their ideals. My primary complaint against conservatism for its own sake is this: that its adherents seem to often work upward from a total disregard for the historicity of ideologies, including their own. It is built upon the belief that some specific ideals are embedded within nature. It is the inability to comprehend the minisculinity of one’s own perspective and the complex web of factors which influenced the so-called “natural” laws which presently govern society. It is the belief that society is a part of nature. It is to hold a philosophical rejection of a priori knowledge while simultaneously acting as though one’s own beliefs are interwoven in existence itself as the norm which all are to bow before. It is paradoxical, and is therefore something which I cannot agree with, and I refuse to stand idly by while anyone attempts to empower such ideals.

And it is crucial to recognize that such critiques are simply not going to be sensible to many of this sort of conservatives. It is said that in some ways the line between conservative and liberal tendencies seems rooted in psychological differences. That more conservative individuals seem far more concerned with survival and the mitigation of threats. This may strengthen the urge toward stability and the rejection of change in understandable ways. The mediator within me wants to see the positives of such a mentality and how it might work in tandem with the openness of a more liberal perspective in order to effectively synthesize a functional and more or less balanced system as a result. But it seems as though conservative ideology has dug so deep into its own filth that it refuses to adapt. It seems instead to insist that it regress further and to drag others with it. It clings to beliefs which should be unheard of in modern developed countries. It celebrates the comforts provided by the hard-earned progress of others before them, but it refuses to acknowledge that such luxuries had to result from some prior state of being. Such advancements are the result of the rejection of outdated explanations of phenomena: progress, as best as I can define it. But conservatives frequently suppose that the way they live is the result of little more than their being plopped happily into their own little existence. And there is some merit to this claim, but the utter lack of deep understanding to be found in it seems unfit for those who might design public policy or otherwise attempt to influence political action which affects the lives of millions. It is to drastically oversimplify the scenario we all face, and as a result, to oversimplify the responses to challenges in this scenario.

I can respect conservative views when the arguments for them sufficiently pass logical judgment and present solid empirical evidence. But I struggle to find the ever elusive conservative who does not base their arguments on wild suppositions. When I find them, they absolutely fascinate me. It is almost as though I am talking to someone who is not necessarily conservative, but who simply has different interpretations. The labels do not necessarily come into play because they haven’t made themselves out to be something which is so cleanly categorized. And yet where are they among the most outspoken conservative population? Perhaps the same criticism may be made against the liberal side, which may hardly be considered as such in the U.S. on average. I similarly judge individuals who attempt to base liberal views, even those I might otherwise agree with, on irrational grounds. I see myself as largely a de facto liberal in quite the same fashion as I might hastily classify someone who has rationally come to opposing viewpoints as a de facto conservtive because that is who they will most likely need to form alliances with. To be liberal or conservative for the sake of being liberal or conservative is, to me, an insult to human intellect. To merely argue that some view is justified by some appeal to some alleged natural order of things is to lose my respect until proven otherwise.

So perhaps I am more of some kind of heavily-politicized empiricist who isn’t quite smart enough to know what the hell he’s talking about. Perhaps the entire notion of liberal/conservative divide does little more than needlessly create tribalistic conflict among people who lack the capacity to genuinely examine among themselves the logical arguments for and against legislation. Perhaps I can never truly find anything in common with any major movement. Is it my rejection of absolute morality which is the root of my alienation? Is this what causes such conflict between myself and others? I must work to find some middle ground, if possible. And yet there seems to be almost no one with any semblance of power or influence who might share such a mission, leaving me with nowhere to turn except to the black and white liberal/conservative divide that isn’t working for us. Those who call the shots frequently see things as absolute and so we end up with laws which presume fundamental truths which cannot be proven. It is fine to make such claims in general; I do not think it possible to be entirely free of such notions. But when it becomes public, when the arguments must be made across a wide variety of cultures and backgrounds who will all be affected by the outcome, the objectivity of empirical evidence seems to outweigh the glorification of traditions or wildly specific mystical worldviews which regard all others as invalid.

My own arguments against myself fall precisely here. What reason do I have to push my perspectives on others? And yet we all must interact with others or be doomed to total isolation. Our very being is to interfere in the lives of others in some capacity, despite all our best intentions. And to continue to do this seems to require that our reasons for taking any action ought to be more solid than any other if we take seriously the idea of considering each other to be equal moral agents whose wellbeing is of value to ourselves. I see my own views in this way, and I attempt to modify these views in light of new evidence or far better arguments. I long for adaptation. It is adaptation which strengthens us and has allowed us to achieve what we have, even if there is no one to appreciate such achievements aside from ourselves. That we allow ourselves to be governed by individuals who could present no better arguments for their claims than a person diagnosed as suffering from extreme delusions is something which terrifies me to no end. We have a strange double standard in which a person who wildly claimed that Sauron himself is gaining power and we must use all our resources to combat him would be ridiculed, but a person could demand that we politically cater to their belief that homosexuality is some innately evil characteristic and that it is acceptible for a county to entirely refuse to issue marriage licenses in order to enforce this belief or that

What I want is a level playing field in which we may honestly debate, not with personal claims which specifically require the innate dismissal of all other beliefs in order for them to be true, but with facts that support carefully-constructed arguments. This is all I want. I am ultimately not all that concerned with the end result because I do not want an end result. I want exactly the opposite: a conscious acceptance of the need to continuously adapt rather than strive for total societal inertia. I simply want to see how a world might function in which we willingly pursue the most factually-constructed policies. I want to see if I am wrong about my belief that this might be an exponential improvement over our present methodology of ignoring objective facts because they make superstitious people uncomfortable when they have to face reality. And for such a system to function, it seems to require especially strict rules regarding what qualifies as a sufficient piece of evidence, which will need to be determined and updated as needed. The supernatural claims of organizations which are devoted to the collective enjoyment of said beliefs should have no place whatsoever in a world in which these viewpoints not only do not coincide with the majority of participants, but cannot coexist with our knowledge of the physical world itself or even basic human history. Their claims deserve respect within their organization and within the direct social circles of the individuals who occupy them, but they are by no means a proper basis for any governmental system, disregarding the similarities which any group which utilizes administrative techniques may share with the definition of what a government is.

I am somewhat hesitant to hastily advocate for the apostasy of especially devout individuals who are so indoctrinated as to be practically incapable of functioning or justifying their own will to live without their superstitions. Some, particularly those who are not especially strong in their faith to begin with, may make the transition rather painlessly. If someone perhaps utilizes religion only as an occasional cognitive tranquilizer in order to cope with difficulties, then this seems quite reasonable to replace with other coping mechanisms through some honest effort and counseling. But in the case of those who have so deeply integrated myth into their thought processes and lifestyles, the transition can be traumatic, especially if they attempt it alone or while still surrounded by others who may attempt to shame or outright punish them for questioning their faith. It is not easy to make such an extreme transition in life, and without effective therapeutic methods to aid such people, it may seem temporarily more beneficial to simply minimize the impact they may have on others and to eliminate their influence over developing or otherwise susceptible minds while still allowing addicts to safely practice their rituals. And in many ways, this does occur. I think it is the synthesis I can most strongly seek in order to appease those who present such great risks in their irrationality. It is not dissimilar to some of my views I have expressed regarding drug use. It is not the drugs themselves which are harmful, but rather the actions which are taken while under the influence of such substances when such actions affect the lives of other people. Quite similarly, to manipulate others into a dependency on such substances with little to no regard for their actual wellbeing seems to be an example of particularly disgusting behavior due to the immense waste it produces as it steals away time and resources from the person and lessens their overall potential in life. I think it may be possible to some extent to establish supernatural beliefs which are conducive to a fulfilling and intellectually honest life, but they are far from the norm in most cases. I have little doubt that if religion were to lean more in such a direction, I would find far less about it which is worthy of such harsh criticism, but at present this is absolutely not the case. I do, however, think it may be a relatively reasonable goal to pursue if enough people can devote themselves to it. If superstition must exist within the world, then let it do so in a way which is least harmful to us.

Unless we can somehow solve the problem of our biological deterioration (and this may in itself present new problems we cannot predict), we all will die. When this happens to me, I expect my consciousness to cease, although some prolonged state of existence would be incredibly fascinating, I admit. I do not see reason to expect this, however, whether I want it to happen or not. It is futile in a sense because I will not be able to reflect upon such a moment, but I would like to be able to recognize the last moments of my life and to be able to realize that I made the most of this extremely limited time. I can imagine the euphoria of such a sequence of thoughts to be so magnificent as to overwhelm any suffering I may be experiencing at this time. It is, I suppose, this moment, which I can ultimately look forward to, but not necessarily chase after impatiently. By my thinking, my appreciation of such a moment may only be enhanced by more deeply engaging with every moment along the way. To reflect on these moments and all that I did is about all I can hope for. And if I am wrong about this, then all the better, for I will have learned something as well.

Lamentations of a Lapsed Southerner

My primary focus as of late has been the infectious presence of superstition and myth within civilization as a whole. I examine the world and see what appears to be a majority of people who are dangerously incapable of perceiving the physical world in any accurate way. They cloud their own minds with interpretations of the world which are rooted in their beliefs in supernatural phenomena. Without the genuine presence of such things, their entire belief systems collapse and they are left with no satisfactory explanation for their behavior. They are faced with the dilemma of making sense of this, and all too often they choose to cling to the beliefs they have seen to be incompatible with reality time and time again. They do this for reasons I cannot fully discern. I am not these people, and can only suspect that they do this out of complacency, fear of change, or some variety of this manner of thinking. They cannot handle the stressful task of realigning their mental structures to function healthily without the comfort of such magical concepts so they choose to give in and seek refuge in such ideas even when they cannot coexist with the basic laws of reality.

My primary exposure to superstition in my daily life is through the ridiculousness that is Southern American culture, and I wish to discuss this as someone who is intimately familiar with all of its worst qualities. It is a culture which celebrates simple-mindedness, which willingly takes all manner of knowledge for granted as being interwoven in nature itself. It sees the world as a very spiritual thing with all manner of absolute meaning to be found in it. Such meaning cannot be challenged, of course, and to do so would be to commit a great sin in the eyes of a devout southerner. Southerners speak of things like honor, love, liberty, and so on as though they are physical elements, and this is their undoing. This is the precise issue I take with them and with so many other cultures. It is this belief that the names given to particular patterns of human emotions or interpretations of events can be found written into the very code of all reality that disgusts me so much. It is this manner of thinking that creates this intensely misanthropic sensation for me. And while it can certainly be found in people who are not mud-gargling psuedosavages, even individuals who believe quite strongly in the pursuit of the improvement of the human condition, it is almost universally present in the hyperconservative masses who happily buy into Southern culture.

I wish to reiterate–I am not concerned with the Southernness of any of this. I was born and raised in the South and as such I have picked up many habits which are stereotypically Southern that I might not even recognize. I have no problem with a person who speaks with a Southern accent. This is little more than a pattern of English-speaking vocal traits. What I would find offensive is the belief that such a manner of speaking has any intrinsic value. It is not the trait itself, but the mindless adoration of the trait as something which is objectively good or even bad. And I attempt to take as much caution as possible to avoid ensnaring myself in this trap. I do not wish to view logical consistency as having some innate goodness. It cannot have this without me to judge it as such. And at times, I fear I may very well be guilty of such reasoning.

To return to the topic of the South, I think it would be a foolish and unrealistic endeavor to attempt to eliminate the presence of its culture in the world. I see no more reason to do this than to eliminate any other culture. But there are particular qualities of it which we would benefit from destroying. The strong tendency towards conservative ideals as though they are the will of nature, the belief in supernatural nonsense, the themes of honor, the disdain for all other cultures. These are what I would happily do away with and can find no reasonable justification for them in a logically sound society. All of the Southern teachings which breed intellectually-crippled humans who refuse to learn or to adapt ought to be done away with as rapidly as possible before they spread any further and generate more waste than they have already forced us to deal with.

In many ways, one could easily substitute “Southerners” for any number of cultural groups and make the same arguments, and I would gladly do so. The only reason I choose to address the South in particular is because of my constant overexposure to it and all of its disgusting flaws. Every day is filled with ignorant men who are driven by little more than machismo obsessiveness and extreme insecurity as a result of the culture of guilt that their religious backgrounds force on them. Every day is full of “bless your hearts” and other meaningless drivel spewed forth by people who might possibly burst a blood vessel if forced to think critically for more than a short moment. There is always talk of being a man and of doing what’s right without any discussion of what these phrases even mean exactly and what basis of reasoning may be found behind them. That step is skipped over entirely in favor of adhering to the traditions of those who saw the world as a magical place made especially for them and the result is a population of humans who see the world in the same light. The difference is that given modern common knowledge of the physical world, such views cannot be reasonably justified if they require the existence of supernatural forces when no such things can function alongside physical laws.

To discuss this drives me to points of frustration I can hardly tolerate. I cannot adequately express how much I hate living here or how much I want to leave in search of a more rational place. But I am stuck here because of my financial weakness and my desire to attend school without paying outrageous out-of-state tuition costs. And even then I find myself questioning whether this is even a worthwhile barrier to avoid crossing. What is some additional debt when compared to my own sanity and ability to live without needless stress? Given my own minimalist outlook, it seems far less likely that I will accumulate nearly as much debt as the average person, so perhaps this might offset some increase in college debt. It is a situation I find perplexing and quite troubling, but one that I believe is worth pondering. And yet I wonder where I might even go. I cannot lie to myself and believe that there is anywhere I might move to that would be uniformly in tune with my own perspective of the world. I realize even among people with whom I am more or less in agreement, there are still significant disagreements. But what brings me back around is that I realize that these differences are not so fundamentally in conflict with one another. It is not a difference between my belief in material existence and someone else’s belief that there is some non-material world. It is between people who see the world as a physical place which is absolutely open to interpretation and will therefore bring with it disagreements that can be discussed. If I cannot even discuss such topics with someone, then what progress can ever be made? There is hope for increased cooperation between myself and someone who might interpret how best to operate within a society we can both agree exists as a human creation and which operates according to natural laws. There is no hope whatsoever for such cooperation between myself and someone who stubbornly believes that the world possesses some quality it cannot have.

On the Subject of Fools

I despise the fool. I can accept that now. I can embrace it and use it to improve myself and the world I live in. I do not mean a better world as in a place where all can see it as such because I would never believe in the notion of any shift in the condition of the world that would please everyone. I mean it as better on the basis of the judgment of better minds. That is who I respect, not the idiots who believe themselves to be special and with purpose. The imbeciles who expect all events to have a relation to their very well-being, their purpose in life that they refuse to claim for their own. May they die all the sooner and the rest of us be better off for it.

There are some who are impossible to live alongside. And it is a difficult thing to endure when such a person is deeply connected or bonded to oneself. I know all too well how conflicting it is to know the worthlessness of a loved one. It is not impossible to love them, but it is difficult to justify their prolonged existence when they do nothing but worsen the world. They and their like spread ignorance and cling to foolish superstitions more than any other and are filth which ought to be removed from the remainder of civilization that we may better evolve. We have many problems to solve and this is one: I say solve it instead of feeding it and allowing it to spread so that we may turn our attention to matters of importance.

The meaningless scene. They fear for his useless life. Look upon this man. What is it he can do? He has ruined his physiology and they cling to him like a cherished doll. They speak to him and receive no reply. His eyes stare blankly into nothingness. It is as though he is not here. They love this man. He is of the same blood, their father, their son. But what does he bring them? There is some appreciation to give for his role in bringing them into being, but even they show little sign of sanity. They are a superstitious lot, seeing signs pointing to obvious meaning in their lives in everything they witness because they so desperately wish for such meaning. They believe because he has endured and continued to unfortunately live and bring suffering to those he comes in contact with that some higher power has a plan for him. They place their faith in a non-existent thing and he will die nonetheless. He will die and they will still construct their own reason for this, believing that there had to be a plan for him even in death if they have to jump through hoops and justify his passing as a trial of faith for themselves. But I mock them. I say his purpose was to die and feed the worms. Let us see who is correct here. I at least know my purpose for him is of my own creation. They insist on the involvement of some other interested party because their own reason to endure the misery of their ignorant lives depends on it. They were born of a fool and perhaps they were fortunate enough to avoid basking in the influence of his brand of stupidity that they may be functional humans, but as long as they do not allow themselves this respect then they reduce themselves to the status of filth. Instead of becoming more, they cling to this hideous blemish of a creature and speak to it because they refuse to let go of him in spite of his uselessness. They become useless themselves in petting this piece of furniture as it gargles in a drug-induced stupor and given the knowledge that he would never regain consciousness they would happily force others to keep his biological motors idling so they can adore their beloved doll as it drains them of their time and resources and that of others in exchange for a great deal of excrement.

I am the result of useless people like this and this has long been a subject of frustration for me. And I can only justify my existence by becoming something of my own choosing through transcendence of their ignorant fundamentalism. I understand that their provision for me is directly responsible for my ability to now prosper, but my desire to return the favor is unwanted and I will not push further. I also understand that they would never have had the means to sufficiently provide for me if not for the intellectual and technical advancements of better humans. It is to these humans I am thankful. I would have faced difficulties regardless and will continue to do so. That they recklessly put me through additional struggles helped in some way to result in the being that I am but was not crucial and was still a less useful aid than direct assistance or encouragement rather than the unintentional strengthening of my own stubbornness which, in a roundabout way, allowed me to reject their attempts at making me into a simpleton. It will genuinely be a better world when they are gone and while this might hurt me, it is only because I have been in continuous contact with them with enough positive experiences to develop bonds. But they seek no wisdom. They seek no improvement. They seek no achievement. They seek something they claim to have found and yet they still seek as they grope in the darkness with nary a thing to discover. They have some small potential perhaps, but I have long exhausted any optimism for any seismic shift in their behavior. So I move onward. If they work it out then this will be cause for celebration, but I have done what I see as my part.

Instead of exhausting myself by clinging to filth, I turn my attention to what I would willingly do. I live and understand my life and the universe to the degree that I do because others sought that information out. And they owed their fortune to the work of earlier generations of inquisitors alike. They were dissatisfied with the answers that others never bothered to question, wanting clarity above comfort and stability and we are better off for such work. I see the views of ancient people as obsolete and ridiculous now and I imagine they very much thought the same of the outdated beliefs of their time. For that I am thankful that they would dare to challenge the false explanations that came before them only because it eventually led to this point. And I hope to contribute in my own way and to someday be seen as an ancient fool who knew nothing of the world’s nature because this will indicate an exponential growth of knowledge comparable to that between the ancients and ourselves. I long to be refuted and yet simultaneously remembered by those wise enough to understand the importance of previous innovators. We may mock the intelligence of say, the Greeks, when compared to some of our knowledge that we now take for granted, but they are remembered not as some absolute truth-bearers, at least not by the well-adjusted, but as thinkers of great wisdom during their time whose influence may still be felt today in the advancements that built upon their own. If I can die with this appreciation in mind, then I will consider that something to look forward to at the very least. A pleasant enough way to leave. I refuse to die without a desperate attempt at improving the lives of others.

What role of any social value may a fool truly play in the world? What reason do we have to continue to tolerate the presence of the genuine fool? Why should we allow the fool to present a large number of unnecessary risks to us and the world itself?

It is important to consider just what a fool is. You may know a fool by their inability to critically examine the world around them. A fool will consider everything that they have been taught to believe to be the final judgment of truth. They have no capacity to comprehend the fact that someone had to teach that information to the person who taught them and so on. They will struggle to understand that knowledge does not simply manifest itself in some void and that the world has not merely existed in the present state for eternity until they conveniently came to be. They will be unable to grasp the fact that they are not the only conscious agent, and that countless others existed long before them chronologically. What follows is a person who is seemingly led about on a leash by whatever forces may manage to grab hold of them. Their potential for exploitation knows no limits. They will question nothing once it is embedded in their minds and they will happily embrace anything which confirms any beliefs which they presently hold because it is the path of less effort despite completely doubling back on itself without ever really going anywhere.

Civilization has, both fortunately and unfortunately, been built through the exploitation of fools, and as such has managed to find ways to efficiently breed fools to serve its needs. Unfortunately because it has led to the infestation of fools to which we owe much of the waste in society, and fortunately because it has allowed us to reach a technological milestone where it may potentially be possible to eliminate the need for fools, or at least for organic ones.

At present, the fool seems to serve some practical purpose within society. The fool is well-suited for mind-numbing and repetitive labor which would be entirely unfulfilling to anyone with the capacity to contemplate what it is that they are doing with all of their time. The fool seems to serve as an excellent and loyal consumer of products to sustain the capitalist order which requires more and more commodities to be bought each day, whether these items are of any use or not. Due to their incomparable susceptibility to manipulation, fools are prime targets for marketing campaigns and the like.

But this is only the common fool. Should the fool manage to obtain money and power, they are all too willing to haphazardly waste these resources by purchasing more trash or investing in the production of such trash themselves so that they may better fund their addictions. They advance just beyond the ordinary level of stupidity present in the common fool and attain the ability to significantly impact the world’s population through their actions as they run households, businesses, and even governments. They have no regard for any but themselves and because of this, they choose to construct beliefs about the nature of reality based on their personal preferences rather than what may be clearly demonstrated not only to them, but to anyone else with equal clarity.

To clarify, a fool is someone who cannot understand their place as a single fraction of a totality, and whose actions and thoughts reflect this. They act as though they alone are the totality, still trapped in the basic human perspective of what is directly present before them during their short lifespans. To them, nothing else may be imagined as real. They see the world as their story alone, not as a vast pattern of physical material of which their existence is but a microscopic part. They struggle to even comprehend any relationship to the other agents they interact with outside of their function as objects to interact with. Out of ignorance, they ignore the observable presence of consciousness that may be seen across all others in favor of pretending that it all was made for them. They see all others as superfluous, never once considering how hopeless their survival would be as a lone creature and how dependent they truly are on the existence of their fellow humans. There is the potential for virtue to be seen in independence, but to delude oneself into believing that any creature that requires the existence and cooperation of others to come into being itself can be entirely self-sufficient is madness. We require other humans, and that is a fact. One solitary human, if it could somehow appear magically out of nothing, would live a short and brutal life and then it would die, leaving nothing but its corpse behind. There would be no offspring, only the echoes of its actions which would grow ever fainter over time. And the corpse left behind, whether its previous consciousness would have preferred it or not, would be consumed by other organisms. We are pieces among pieces, and that is something that we ought to accept rather than attempt to deny in favor of some false optimism, so that we may develop a more genuine optimism of sorts.

The fool is wasteful in their nature because they cannot understand the impact of their actions or simply refuse to do so. They are currently able to be utilized for activity which we would otherwise prefer not to do and are therefore justifiable entities, but what use would they have should such work eventually be performed by automated machinery? The onset of automation and artificial intelligence could provide an opportunity to remove any sufficient argument for the prolonged existence of fools among us. If a fool’s utility is found only in their ability to perform tasks without any real understanding of what they are doing or why, then what would separate them from mere machines at this point aside from their biological designation as humans?

I have wondered for some time if we can hope to sustain the notion that all humans deserve to be given the same basic rights based only on their species. While I can see the appeal in it and arguments for it, I fear that it may ultimately be too wasteful to maintain. There seems to be no sufficient justification for any differences of rights based on little more than physical traits. The evidence strongly indicates that concepts such as race are simply patterns of traits that ignorant ancestors saw as indicative of innate biological differences, a belief which their fool descendents still continue to cling to out of comfort. There is no difference in what is often referred to as a race and a certain collection of physical characteristics which may be passed on genetically from human to human, such as hair color, eye color, skin tone, and so on. Short of physical deformities which directly hinder the human’s ability to function, traits such as these provide no indication of a human’s worth, only their appearance.

The person’s actions define them and their interactions with others. That so many of us are fools who immediately pass judgment on others for having certain physical characteristics is a significant obstacle which cripples us and breeds even more fools as a result. The refusal to provide equal opportunities to individuals based on physical traits hinders their ability to acquire the knowledge required to effectively participate in society, further strengthening the illusion that such people are inherently flawed due to the inability of fools to separate the correlation of certain physical traits with these people’s lack of intelligence–in itself the result of the interference of fools who believe themselves keepers of all absolute knowledge, which naturally was determined in antiquity and cannot be improved upon for fear of change.

I am hesitant to declare any ultimate solution to the problem of fools, for I alone lack the capacity to make such a decision for the rest of humanity. It is a decision better left to a large collective of people, and while I would gladly contribute, there seems to be no real discussion of this topic. So for now I present some intentionally broad suggestions that may in many ways be summarized as a suggestion for prison reform:

Upon obtaining the means to control the fool population, establish a clear and open policy of intolerance for foolish behavior.
Make fools aware that their behavior itself and their lack of understanding is what is causing them to be treated the way that they are. Clarify that this is subject to change if they are able to demonstrate intellectual improvements and as a result, decrease the wasteful impact of their activity.
Separate the fool population from the citizenry upon establishing a certain intellectual prerequisite for the latter designation.
Establish controlled and isolated areas of confinement for fools, not to hold them indefinitely, but to educate them in hopes of integrating them into a functional population.
Maintain observation over rehabilitation operations, easing the functional individuals further into society and the nonfunctional ones further out.
Extreme care should be taken to make it known to nonfunctional individuals that their prolonged existence cannot be justified if they continue to display antisocial behavior and opposition to intelligence and learning.
Breeding privileges are to be restricted to citizens and fools will be barred from the activity by means of force if necessary. Measures should be established to ensure adequate genetic diversity among citizens in the absence of a significant population decrease. These will be determined by present technological capabilities and advancements in genetic knowledge.
Any acts of violence, endeavors to establish tribes for the sake of foolish activity, prejudice on the basis of superstition or myths, the practice of superstitious activity, or the encouragement of foolish beliefs or behavior is to result in termination.
Upon sufficient review of the fool’s ability to integrate into society and to develop the skills and understanding required in order to do so, it may be determined that such a goal is impossible to achieve and termination of the subject will result.
In order to encourage the smoothest integration of fools into society, establish systems which emphasize the enlightenment of participants. Establish rehabilitation protocols for substance addicts. Establish chemical and therapeutic care for those with mental illnesses.
Return all rights to successful graduates of rehabilitation programs.
Revoke all rights from convicted fools.
Establish sufficient and reasonable processes of determining the evidence of an individual’s status as a fool. Implied within the design of such precautions is the understanding that intense rehabilitation in itself is a process which utilizes additional resources and that only necessary candidates need be forced into it if less harsh measures may be taken.

I would suggest extreme criticism be given to these ideas and for additional input to be delivered. The system is a means to an end: the coming of a civilization which is driven primarily by ideals which are not derived from assumptions but from observable evidence. Such a civilization might see its prolonged existence not as a good thing in itself, but as a logical goal to strive for as a result of their status as living beings which recognize themselves as selves among many others and which are reliant upon one another and the resources available to them for survival, which will inevitably cease at some point due to the finite nature of the universe. Until that point, action must be taken to ensure the prolonged existence of the process of knowledge attainment and idea creation by sentient beings capable of developing such things, whether those are human or otherwise, if only for the sake of potential improvement of the conditions of future beings as a result of the activity of previous sentients who allowed the same rights to be passed on. And I would stress, above all, that if a civilization can effectively eliminate the existence of fools from its list of burdens, it should take all the precautions it can to prevent the resurgence of such a disgusting force.

Fear Beyond the Sphere

As creatures who thrive on identifying patterns, we seem to find ourselves on a never-ending quest for meaning and purpose. We are pragmatic in that we see the function of things, the uses that they have, the results they will bring about. We function more effectively by developing understandings of how we may reasonably expect events to occur. We survive best as social creatures and develop methods of sharing identified patterns with others through communication. This very blog post I am typing is only understandable to anyone else because we share a system of language and enough mutual understanding of concepts that we may make connections between them to illustrate new ideas.

But the words and ideas and meanings themselves are not physical. They are patterns, and I repeat myself to the point of exhaustion attempting to adequately make this clear. The patterns themselves are not even physical, but are abstract representations in our minds of the relationships between physical objects. There is no “movement” in reality, only matter. The movement is what we call the shift of matter’s position. It is not some entity which exists in nature. It is a phenomenon, even if it is a common one which seems to cause us no real excitement due to its regular occurrence.

Attempt to fathom perceiving, for the entirety of your life up until now, nothing but an inert sphere. You see the light which the sphere reflects from it and nothing else. All is dark otherwise. For twenty years you see this sphere, but how may you know any difference? Without any change of environment, this scene may well have been like one solitary moment for you. You have nothing to compare this to. You have only the sphere. Suddenly there is a change. The sphere begins to draw closer. Imagine the intensity of such a moment. Imagine how you might react to such an event after years of inactivity.

Temporarily disregard the inability of the sphere to simply move with no source of energy, for this is not the point. Consider instead the limitations of what you might be capable of thinking in such a scenario. What could you think of except for the image of the sphere? To have its nature suddenly change and for the sphere to move would be life-changing. You would have witnessed the very bending of reality as you knew it. You would now know two things: the sphere, and the movement of the sphere. But this would not make the movement any more of a thing. The sphere is a thing which may be observed. Its movement is an action which you observed the sphere perform. Your observation is the action which you may perform. But they are not physical things. They are the relationships between the things–yourself and the sphere.

Continue onward. Envision a strange reality in which after several millennia spent observing the sphere and its movement, your vision begins to morph. You are able to see the sphere at a smaller and more detailed level. You see it not as a sphere, but as a collection of particles forming the sphere you ordinarily would see. Compared to the movement of the sphere, this would be exponentially more life-changing. The entirety of your understanding would change forever. You could no longer reasonably see the world as but a sphere and its movement, but as something much more detailed, and you would long to know more about these particles and how they might behave. You would question the movement of the greater sphere. You might see it not simply as simply a thing the sphere does, but as something which might be caused by some smaller force. There might be some reason that the sphere moves that you cannot identify.

If you were of the same mentality that we often take for granted, then such a scenario would fill you with intrigue and the compulsion to seek more knowledge. But we cannot say just what the sphere-watcher might think, if anything. Its very existence would be so different from our own as to be alien. To be plunged into such an existence while in the mental state we are presently in would no doubt be traumatizing. But for the sphere-watcher, it would be comparable in some way to the incredible increase in our ability to more finely examine the world over the past century. It might very well be as traumatic for them as it has been for many of us to have our comfort disrupted. They might refuse to believe that what they have seen is factual, that what is actually true is only the sphere, if only because believing in the sphere alone is familiar and comforting. The alarming reaction to this new frontier of experience might persuade them to reject the existence of the sphere’s elementary components. Suppose there were other sphere-watchers who could communicate. Suppose the majority of them responded to this discovery with disgust, insisting that it was blasphemous to their total understanding of the world. Suppose a minority of them began to embrace this greater awareness and dug deeper. Suppose they invented new ways of manipulating these particles and creating new shapes to observe and new patterns to identify. Suppose that the majority continued to ignore these discoveries when the curious ones shared them in favor of the ever familiar sphere alone.

At some point it would seem that the curious observers would face a choice: to continue to attempt to convince the others that they are wrong in hopes that they will join them in uncovering new patterns and enjoying them or to isolate themselves from the stubborn masses. I see life in some ways as quite similar to this predicament. I wonder at what point it is more beneficial to cull the disease before it spreads and becomes impossible to control. I wonder if it is foolish to consider such a disease to be entirely impossible to control. It is only impossible to control given the continued trends. If these trends may be adjusted, then perhaps there may be hope.

I do not typically write in this fashion and I find myself in an unusual mood. I am angry. I have such great contempt for the superstitious and willfully ignorant who would rather cling to joys which cannot coexist with the entirety of consistently identified patterns. There is no real reason for me to hold myself back from recklessness apart from my understanding of previous patterns of aggression toward others on the basis of nothing but disagreement. I see the waste of destruction and also the waste of prolonged disregard and I lack the ability to accurately measure which is ultimately worse. That is the question which plagues me.

I am not bothered by the end of existence itself. Such an event seems inevitable given the patterns of reality we can observe. I am instead bothered by the potential for the premature destruction of human existence and potential. And this is not for the sake of some magical love of humanity as an inherently valuable idea or some belief that humans are special, but only because of my recognition that that is what I am and a sort of obsessive desire to know more about myself and others like me. To know more about reality itself because I am a part of it. To appreciate that my ability to even comprehend such things is because of previous generations of curious humans who dared to wonder what else there might be to know. That they managed to develop methods of communicating and passing such information on so that others might harness it and improve upon it is nothing short of amazing and I think in many ways I would be doing myself a great disservice by refusing to contribute to this project. Explain to me how that is more pessimistic than the conviction that this is all hopelessly futile in comparison to what will not follow in some nonexistent fantasy afterlife. Explain to me how I am the one who sees no reason to live. I see all the reason in the world and I may take my pick from the lot. It is the person who refuses to accept anything less than the reason that cannot be who suffers. It is the insistence that there is some absolute meaning to be found where it simply cannot be that leads us to despair when we consistently fail to find it.

I hope that we can begin to change the nature of the thoughts we force into still-developing minds. I hope that we can learn to communicate to children in ways that do not deceive them from the start. I hope that by starting with the truth, or at least the present understanding of it, we can prevent the inevitable crisis that comes with the later crumbling of lies that ought not to have been told in the first place. That is what I ultimately mean by waste and is why I so greatly oppose it. It is one thing to learn that something is wrong. It is entirely another to discover that the person who taught it to you had the means to know better.

Religious Belief As A Mental Illness

This is hardly an original claim to make. Many critics of religion have made it and so shall I. Religion is a mental illness and should be treated as such.

I grow increasingly impatient with the nature of people. The endless superstitions that control them, the lack of interest in any aspect of the world outside of their own limited perceptions, the belief that they alone exist as the subject of meaning in some vacuum of their own creation. Enough of them.

I have no respect for the foolish nor the audacity to expect anything else from them in return. I do not expect to command their respect nor would I believe them capable of genuinely making such a judgment for themselves. I happily consider any conscious being to have the potential to be an active participant in reality, but until such skill can be demonstrated, I have no reason to suspect that they will actually do so.

The bulk of these religious creatures spend their days filled with certainty that their preferred interpretations of reality are true merely because they believe them to be. Their delusions are so because it is convenient for them. They present no solid reasoning behind their claims. They present nothing short of symptoms of insanity and yet we give them the respect offered to someone who is free of delusions. We offer this to them free of charge, expecting nothing, which they are all too happy to give in return. They believe their comfortable existences to be of their own construction while simultaneously holding worldviews which suggest the direct involvement of some illusional character in all things. These beliefs change from moment to moment depending on what arguments they need to justify their whims. There is no respect for logical consistency among them.

We allow such dangerous people to prosper and to spread their ignorance far and wide. We give them positions of power so they can directly assert dominance over us based on their whimsical fancies and then we question why they would do such a thing and how it could have ever come to this. We allow our cultural norms to remain in harmony with the beliefs of people whose beliefs regarding the physical world would conflict with ours in every possible way. As though we might offend these no longer living humans by breaking their laws. Yet another ridiculous myth of ours.

I can trust no one who lives their life as though there is some other life waiting for them. This sort of thinking causes them to regard life as inherently disposable and as something which is altogether not worth investing one’s energy in. To see this as a passing phase and a meaningless one at that. I can sympathise with the meaninglessness, but certainly not in the same sense. To them, there is a meaning, but it is not here. To me, it is not to be found anywhere to begin with unless we decide it to be. It is a pattern that gives us delight or which convinces us that the connections of its components make sense. That pattern we identify is what we call a meaning and there is no such physical thing dwelling in nature.

I see their reasoning like this: They go into a casino and visit a roulette table. They gaze upon the possible bets they may make and boldly choose yellow 30.4, placing their bet somewhere toward the edge of the table as the croupier stares in awe of their stupidity. Their refusal to regard the rules of the game as genuine merely because they would prefer to place some impossible bet does not make it any more likely that the bet will suddenly manifest itself on the wheel. It is possible in some sense that it might, but it would require a complete upending of the rules, which cannot be shown to have a history of change. They may believe with all their will that their bet is possible, and it might well be, but that has no effect on what actually happens. Living among the religious masses is akin to playing a roulette game with people all around the table attempting to bet on non-existent numbers and colors and so on. It is certainly a spectacle to be sure, but it makes the endeavor of seriously playing the game into a nightmare for gamblers who prefer to do so.

I have struggled to discern any meaningful difference between religious beliefs and any other delusion we would otherwise attribute to mental illness. What difference can there be? They are both illusions which are disconnected from any commonly perceivable reality. What else can be said? What makes one any more acceptable than the other in a society that wishes to value coherence and rational consistency? I suppose the problem is that we do not live in such a culture, but rather one that is happy to pick and choose what is logical. It is this realization that causes me such great distress. To fear that I am a prisoner under the tyranny of a horde of dangerous enemies. It is why the destruction of myth, or at least the widespread respect of it, is perhaps my primary goal. Such issues only become even more extreme when religious themes are interwoven with other mental illnesses, leading to hallucinations of gods or voices they believe to be commanding them to do serious harm to others or to themselves. There are countless hazardously deranged people running about trying to convince other delusional people to turn to their favorite deities as wondrous cure-alls for problems that should be dealt with by healthcare professionals.

The religious problem is one we should not even be dealing with, but here we are. At least I can accept this reality instead of sitting about hoping that it will solve itself like those who claim to know within their heart that some god will intervene in the world just for the benefit of them. How special they are to personally know the truth in its entirety, which conveniently conflicts with the answers of anyone else to whom you might pose such questions of eternal importance. Ask of one religious person what the answer to a matter of faith is and then go and ask another, even within the same congregation. Compare the results and laugh. Of course they are both magically correct by their own epistemic standards. Anything is possible if you merely prefer it be the case in the minds of such people. The same may be said of those suffering from schizophrenia, but we hardly construct our laws in order to cater to their delusions or grant them authority over every aspect of our lives because we think their beliefs coincide with “family values”. There are not entire television networks and media empires centered on providing platforms for people who believe their microwaves to be their deceased brothers, or at least none that I’ve had the misfortune of witnessing. I find it alarming that we can mock the beliefs of the mentally ill while encouraging the equally impossible ramblings of preachers. The sharing of religious social media posts ought to be seen not as something praiseworthy, but as a sign that there might be something seriously wrong with the person who posted it. It should be seen as a sign that those who care about them should attempt to help them, not encourage such insanity.

I do not by any means suggest that the solution to such behavior is criminalization of any sort, but rather that it be treated like any other psychiatric disorder which might have the potential to put these individuals or others at great risk. As it stands, we already do far too little to provide treatment for those with mental illnesses. And improvements to such care should follow closely with the proper classification of religious belief as one of them. It is one thing to consider people who suffer from mental illness to be just as human as we are, with sometimes crippling conditions which are detrimental to their prosperity or survival. It is quite another to value such conditions or see them as positive things that ought to be experienced by anyone. It is possible, I believe, to respect someone’s status as a human or citizen while simultaneously holding the belief that their behavior is harmful to others and ought to be prevented.

In the meantime, stop and take a moment to appreciate the pleasant little coincidence you are. There doesn’t have to be anything spiritually significant about your existence. It doesn’t have to have some divine purpose or creator who orchestrated it with some grand scheme in mind for you to play a part in. It seems all the more wondrous to me when seen for what it is: a fantastically unlikely outcome which actually did occur. Don’t let people cheapen your life by insisting that it was given to you by someone who willed it to be so. Don’t let them convince you that even your life is pointless and that true happiness may be found by sacrificing it or that you may enjoy eternal pleasure in some fantasy realm that was conceived with no consideration of the physical contradictions it has with reality. Accept your status as a complex structure of matter that happened to gain the helpful illusion of sentience. Then perhaps we may go from there.

What do you want to do?

I often ask of people – “Suppose that your financial needs are satisfied. You will have enough money to live comfortably, regardless of what you do in this scenario. Would you continue to work at the job you have now?” The answers to this question are expectedly not in favor of sticking to their current work in most cases.

I work in a hospital, so a large portion of the people to whom I pose this question are unsurprisingly healthcare workers. There’s something concerning about the realization that most of the people who should have an investment in the well-being of their patients have nothing of the sort. More often than not, the resulting conversations reveal the primary motive for pursuing a healthcare career is little more than a realization that many of these jobs are relatively accessible and safe avenues into the middle-class.

What often follows is a long pattern of generally poor performance, disregard for quality of care, burnout, and dissatisfaction with their work and their lives. There are, quite fortunately, some exceptions. I am ecstatic whenever I find a nurse who tells me they would genuinely choose no other thing to do with their time than to care for others who need their help. But more often than not, the answers are very distressing indeed. The lack of any real desire to do the work one performs ultimately leads to pitiful or even detrimental results.

There are plenty of factors to consider here. There is a high demand for healthcare workers, but much of this is artificially influenced by a healthcare system that is fundamentally broken and which encourages unnecessary visits and procedures for the sake of profit. Many patients who need only routine care visit emergency rooms in order to take advantage of legislation which requires facilities to provide care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. It takes next to no effort to recognize that there is absolutely a great need for healthcare professionals, but hardly anyone is stopping to consider whether that need is even justified itself.

This expands far beyond the healthcare industry alone. The constant need to pursue profit above all other motivations has created a terribly dysfunctional social condition that only worsens the more we allow it to recklessly expand. The pursuit of endless financial growth has created entirely unnecessary industries and efforts to convince unknowing people that they need such pointless things. Few things are made or improved because people want to do so directly, but out of a need to economically dominate others. Countless mountains of media, trinkets, and other trash are stacked high as a result of the involvement of creators who seek not the joy of the act of creation, but the monetary gains that may come from the sale of creations as goods. A tremendous amount of human energy is wasted on convincing others that they need things that they would never want otherwise. Human psychology is often studied not out of a desire to understand the workings of the mind and how best to control our destructive instincts, but how to better manipulate others and to keep them submissive and more susceptible to influence.

So imagine, if you will humor me, that you have your basic needs met regardless of what it is that you do with your time and energy. And beyond yourself, all others will be treated the same. There is no exchange of currency for goods or services. Such things are provided based on supply and supply is determined by people’s own desired output.

One noteworthy criticism of this design suggests that many individuals would be like parasites, choosing to do nothing but endlessly consume, to drink deep of the cesspool of talk shows, celebrity gossip, and mindless noise that is all too readily pushed on those who lack the willpower to deny them. But without any monetary gain to be had from creating such content, I have serious doubts that anyone would continue to produce it. Just what these people would do I cannot be certain of and I am certainly concerned this, but I think it is safe to assume that their drive to fill the world with ever more consumable trash would be eliminated. So this leaves open just what the former consumers would do. And I greatly prefer that open possibility to the present reality and all the needless waste it brings about.

The work that would be done in such a society would likely be of a more consistent level of quality if the people doing such work actually want to do so. In addition, I have reason to suspect that there would be quite a bit less work to be done as a result. The elimination of workers who have no personal investment in their work should theoretically eliminate a large amount of incidents caused by negligence, although well-meaning individuals are still more than capable of making mistakes. A system such as this might maintain certain levels of quality by requiring certain qualifications in order to perform skilled forms of labor. It is difficult to tell whether there would be a long-term problem with inactive citizens or not. As mentioned, many of the comforts which keep people so inert would likely be eliminated, but with the freedom to do as one pleases might come an overabundance of activity which would result in products that might be considered to be of little practical use. There is also the potential for people to simply shift their consumptive habits in the direction of whatever commodities might be available to them. Given the average human temperament, it seems unlikely that many people would willingly choose to live inactive lifestyles without the lures of consumption, but human nature is often the bearer of unpleasant surprises.

I do think it likely that such a system would have its own flaws, however. There would be little incentive for people to produce any goods to contribute to the population beyond their own joy derived from contributing and from realizing that their own contributions allow others to benefit and likewise, they benefit from the contributions of others. A sort of common empathetic understanding might allow such a system to function, but I am not entirely optimistic that it would be feasible at the large societal scale we are used to relying on without some intense consideration of how to design such a system in order that it might function reliably. Automation would likely go a long way toward achieving such a goal, however, and if less humans were necessary to supply the society’s needs, then it would follow that such needs would be lessened by the existence of a smaller population.

These are, of course, rather impractical ideas at present, and it is important to recognize them as such. The specifics of such a system would be difficult to plan out in advance, given how unfamiliar we are with how such a thing would function in practice. I have advocated for especially fluid and modular social systems and this would be no exception. I maintain that any system meant to successfully maintain order and wellness for citizens should be adaptive by design rather than rigidly structured according to the needs of whatever generation designed it as though future generations will forever have the same needs or face the same challenges.

Returning to the point of such a system’s potentially lesser population requirements in order to sustain itself, many would notice the likely consequence of a decrease in human population. I do not see this as a negative thing in itself. There is no real value I can discern to having a greater number of humans running about apart from having more potential approaches to solving problems or perspectives with which to gain insight. It seems more efficient to have less total people who each live more meaningful lives than more people who live miserable ones and because of this I would suggest that it would be more beneficial to pursue such a population. Aided by automation and by artificial intelligence, should we ever successfully implement it in a way which would allow for such a reality, this might be attainable. For now, it seems better to leave this as merely a novel idealistic goal to dwell on. From such ideals might come policies and goals that may be realistically implemented into the system we have at present.

It is worth considering that while past and present economic practices may have fortuitously led to where we are now, this does not indicate a requirement that they will always be necessary if an alternative can be successfully adopted. Perhaps with some effort, we can eventually find ourselves doing only the work which we genuinely want to do. Perhaps such a drastically different approach to life might be more sustainable with regard to the limited resources available to us. Perhaps I am wrong. Even that would be a worthwhile discovery in itself. To be wrong is to eliminate one possibility out of many, and to be correct is to allow one possibility to remain.

Some Thoughts On Waste and Rational Blindness

I should make it clear that my primary motivation behind most of my reasoning rests on a couple of basic principles–that the physical world is the only thing which we may interact with (Including making claims about it), that we as self-aware beings decide whether it is worthwhile for us to continue to exist or not, that we must take special caution to maintain the functionality of our habitat which allows us to live and to actively guide the course of our own collective beliefs and actions with regards to such prosperity if we wish to exist over the long-term, and that we should take such threats into account when designing governments or economic systems. This, I believe, can adequately help to explain where I’m coming from in a lot of my arguments.

I readily accept some natural level of value for certain materials simply because they are finite and exist only in limited quantities, even if that total amount is far more than we could reasonably expect to ever need. In this, I accept that a sufficient tool with which to estimate how effectively we utilize such materials for our own needs is the concept of waste. Waste, in my understanding of it, is the misappropriation of resources. This may be materials, time, individual lives–anything which may be considered valuable and limited in quantity. Much of my thought is focused on addressing what I identify as a cause of the majority of waste–the spread of false ideas–and a particularly serious example of waste that concerns me is the fabrication of unnecessary work and the manufacture of problems which are not genuine.

To give an example of such a problem while sticking to my common theme of myth and superstition, to believe that there is some external force which is directly invested in our own actions and judges them accordingly brings with it an imperative to obey the commands of such an entity. With such belief will come all manner of imagined duties which must be carried out and the guilt which will come with avoiding such actions. It is made even worse when organized systems provide actual human judgement by living, breathing, creatures in order to enforce these alleged truths and laws which have no basis in reality. The result is wasted time and effort dedicated to needless actions in order to appease imaginary beings whose hypothetical concern for our actions is itself extremely dubious.

To provide a more pragmatic example, a company chooses to drug test employees at random and fires them on the basis of having traces of a substance deemed illegal in their system that they may have no present effect on their consciousness. What problem is occurring here? It may be one thing to do this to someone who has been involved in an accident where there might be reason to suspect that they were intoxicated at the time. But what reason is there to randomly enforce limitations on the private activities of employees? What can come of this apart from the loss of staff for the employer, and the loss of employment for the employee, along with the vast web of repercussions which may follow? What basis is there for this? We don’t allow companies to randomly search through workers’ phones in order to find illicit documents or the like. Who decided that the act of utilizing a substance to manipulate the chemical makeup of one’s mind was inherently wrong or harmful to others in any way?

Even in the case of an industrial accident, it is still not necessarily the intoxication that is the immediately harmful action, but the act of ignoring safety precautions. I am quite sympathetic to the notion of planning a societal system in order to allow the practice of any activity which harms no others. It may be understood that a person who is intoxicated by means of alcohol who happens to murder someone is guilty of murder. But their consumption of alcohol did not directly lead to this outcome. It may have been a contributor to their inhibition which created the mental state in which they were able to make such a decision, but the decision was made by them nonetheless. We do not seem to pay any special attention to a person who commits some atrocity while sleep-deprived, which is certainly not a crime. We do not pay special attention to a formerly intelligent person who harms someone after years of effectively ruining their mental acuity through cognitive inertia and reckless chemical abuse. When a sober person and a drunk person kill someone, it is not the sobriety which is of concern in the end, it is the murder. These are not even issues which truly frustrate me in and of themselves, but needless concerns which arise from the foolish practice of firing employees for possessing traces of a substance that their employers deem to be “wrong”.

Whatever moral claims I make, I endeavor to do so honestly and while recognizing just how arbitrary they are even when I hold them in high regard. My moral system is based around acknowledging little more than the cognitive capacity to understand and accept the terms of whatever agreement is being made between parties. To be unable to do so restricts one from participation in such a covenant. I will elaborate more at a later time, but for now I find it sufficient to say that such moral judgments may only be made by those who may effectively communicate their sentencing to the perpetrator of the act. And if we are to have any sort of moral code which is somewhat close to objectivity, such judgments should not be based on any abstract non-physical interaction or form, but on genuine interactions between the involved beings and the consequences of these actions.

We can not dictate the moral standards of beings which are alien to us, in that their cognitive structure allows them no way for us to effectively communicate ideas with them. We may dictate the terms of engagement which other humans must follow when interacting with these other species, as we can communicate these properly among ourselves. But there is no reason in nature to command us to give any benefits to other animals or even to humans who cannot communicate or comprehend, and this is a distressing realization to many who might come to this conclusion considering how much time we spend as less developed creatures who simply cannot grasp such concepts. As such, it is not a claim which I would make lightly.

I do not say these things to make absolute claims regarding the nature of things, but to question the stagnancy of our beliefs regarding such nature. I do not necessarily wish to make anyone uncomfortable as a primary goal, but I realize that this is a very likely result of thinking about such issues. Such discomfort is a sign of effort; that work is being done to come to some conclusion rather than leaping blindly at the first intuitive idea that comes to mind, and this is the very core statement of my entire thought process. Intuition alone is a dangerous thing that can leave us slaves to antiquated heuristics and the influence of others who are willing to put forth the effort to make decisions for those who will not. Intuition may allow us to make an initial realization or to recognize that there is a problem that must be addressed, but no journey is made by gazing at the starting point and declaring it the destination.

I am more than happy to allow people to dwell on whatever strange possibilities they wish to think of. The problem arises when they attempt to make claims about such things as though they are genuinely physical phenomena when they completely contradict everything else that we can actually demonstrate as functional and extant. I often have my head in the clouds, but at least I choose to dwell in physical clouds that exist. The ones who scare me are those who claim to know that they dwell in the clouds when there are none there to begin with. And although they need only open their eyes to realize this, they find it more soothing to pretend as though they can merely will the clouds into existence by believing them to be present. I will be satisfied only when this sort of person is given the respect deserved by the dirt beneath our feet.

I stress that when I make such claims, I actively long for people to explain how horribly wrong I am. I cannot expect my own thoughts alone to be sufficient to understand the world. My experience is far too limited and my knowledge too narrow to do such a thing without aid. The assistance I long for is the critique of others who might find flaws in my reasoning and bring them to my attention. Perhaps then, we can work together to find a better solution. If I were to claim that I have all the solutions perfectly figured out, I would be no better than the disgusting fools of whom I speak ill and whose ideas are an out-of-control infestation that cripples our chances of survival. And if I could say that I knew all the answers, what then would I have to live for as someone who really only feels alive when pursuing such answers. As they say, the chase is better than the catch in this case.

Abortion Examination

Some thoughts on Alabama’s shift further in the direction of attempting to become a theocracy by banning abortions. While I don’t doubt that there are some who argue against abortion from a strictly secular view, I certainly have not been exposed to them whatsoever. The public outcry against abortion is primarily fueled by a particularly Christian perspective on the world and morality, which is far too fragile to support itself in a reality which confirms none of its nonphysical claims about physical existence. Needless to say, I’m against the idea of banning abortions, which the state I live in has chosen to do because it is a cesspit of superstition and because those in power here benefit from the widespread ignorance of people who will blindly follow them as long as they publicly support legislation which enforces the belief in these superstitions.

There’s a frustrating conundrum at play here that I keep coming back to. The legal state of abortion basically doesn’t affect me at all, given my reproductive wiring. A frequent argument aimed at people who oppose abortion is that they simply need to mind their own business because as long as nobody is forcing them to abort their babies, it doesn’t affect them, which would effectively place them in the same position as myself. The part which causes me some distress is that while I recognize that the decision ought to be more or less made on an individual basis by the person who wishes to prevent the continued development of the potential offspring which is attached to them, that view is not shared by those who most audibly oppose abortion as an action undertaken by others. What do I do here? Is it sufficient for me to remain distanced from the issue since it cannot possibly affect me or do I take a side with the people I would agree with if it were me in their place? What do I do as I watch those with the power to make this decision for everyone proceed to move in that direction, ready and willing to enforce their own interpretation of morality by law and by force. Any opposition I voice against such things is influenced by little more than my desire to live in a world which is driven not by faith and blind assumptions, but by careful examination. I speak out because I do not want to live in a state which allows any religion’s beliefs to be considered factual enough to base laws upon. I also suspect a potential threat to overall well-being in the removal of an option for pregnant women who recognize their inability to be capable parents to the child which is developing inside them. The lack of an ability to prevent the arrival of another human whose chance of any sort of meaningful existence or ability to live to their greatest potential can only hinder prosperity, not strengthen it.

To clarify: my stance on abortion as a practice is that it would be reckless and wasteful of resources to promote it as a commonplace solution to unwanted pregnancy in that it’s retroactive and not proactive to begin with when we have much less resource-intensive and invasive alternatives which negate the initial fertilization to begin with. There would be less need for abortions if people were better educated about sexual health and other matters of simple biology/psychology. It is laughably easy to prevent pregnancies before they even happen if proper procedures are followed. Abortions should, in practice, be for the rare cases in which those options fail for whatever reason or if the parent is aware that the child is going to be born in a condition which will equate to a life of unnecessary misery. It is perhaps outside the scope of this essay to discuss this at greater length, aside from mentioning that I would judge it a far worse act to bring someone else into existence who will live nothing short of an entirely unpleasant life or one in which they are unable to be sufficiently provided for by their parents.

Of course I’m approaching this all incorrectly because, as we know with all certainty, there are of course very present elements within nature called morals which are woven within the fabric of existence and are not a collection of human interpretations of how our own behavior may minimize unwarranted discomfort and maximize pleasure. If this sounds silly, perhaps I’m not as insane as I often feel because that seems to be the baseline that social norms start at and people are notoriously awful at differentiating between beliefs that are socially influenced by tradition or culture and the basic material world, which is bereft of such things in any identifiable way as present in nature. The void cares not, and even this statement may be misinterpreted by many, who might suppose that the universe is literally uncaring and emotionally cold, as in it consciously carries those emotions rather than interpreting that as metaphor implying an absence of human feelings as intended. Our habit of seeing non-conscious collections of matter in this way is a weakness that we would do well to eliminate.

I will readily state until I am wheeled away that human psychology is fundamentally flawed in a serious way that prevents us from leaving behind a lot of incredibly incompatible methods of perceiving the world compared to how the world looks when you try to look at it in as objective a way as you can. It’s fairly understandable for people to get a bit uncomfortable when you start questioning things which are taken as intuitively factual without much thought, and especially when you start questioning all of these things at once. My interpretation of the prolonged clinging to superstitions and nonphysical solutions to physical problems or to oversimplified and outdated means of thinking is that they are wasteful and horribly detrimental to human mental health and prosperity as a whole, no matter how much comfort or meaning they give to people temporarily. They set people up for serious disappointment and needless existential crises when they gaze into a universe which overwhelming leads them to question such beliefs. Such setbacks might well be prevented if we weren’t misled in the first place and did not fill one another’s minds with lazy answers to complex questions from an early age.

I am likely expecting far too much of most people for them to be able to potentially put in the collective effort to effectively engineer a new perspective on reality in order to allow us to start with a blank canvas. In this I can readily admit the abysmal probability of such a future, but I do think the critique still quite valid and technically achievable nonetheless.

My primary issue with a large portion of the pro life side’s argument is its disregard for its own faulty logic. The most coherent defense against abortion seems to state that science shows us that egg and sperm cells fuse to form a distinct new zygote, which is the earliest form of what may be genetically considered a human. Because we have a notion that there is a magical spirit which grants rights to all humans, unless of course such rights involve aborting said zygotes, many claim that this entity is a conscious being at this precise moment of fertilization and is therefore given the same rights as any other citizen (It’s actually only just occurring to me at this time of writing that legal interpretations of a person’s citizenship are frequently based on the geographic location where they emerge out of the womb and into the exterior world where they become separated from the mother’s body). Never mind that it still needs to go through many more steps in order to successfully reach a point where it may start to develop fully into an embryo and a fetus, and even then there is sufficient reason to suspect that their nervous systems are simply not of the sort which could feel pain at all, let alone be self-aware of their own existence. There’s a reason people don’t remember their infancy, and that is a pretty uncomfortable thing for people to think about when you start questioning whether babies are really even fully conscious beings at all.

It’s a wildly complex and nuanced topic of debate that we don’t have a good hard answer for yet and might not find one for that matter. There are a couple ways to address this lack of absolute truth. To take as neutral an approach as you can in establishing the least restrictive and prescriptive legal interpretation of the scenario which is purposely designed to be fluid and adjustable with new information, which is what I would suggest. Or you can say something like, well killing is wrong, and this is obviously a human at fertilization (reasons why it isn’t); oh, well this is a human when it attaches to the uterus (reasons why it isn’t); oh, well it’s a human as soon as it’s this arbitrary age in the womb (reasons why it isn’t), and so on ad nauseum, until you admit that we don’t even have a clear answer to when a human “becomes” a human so we should therefore just go ahead and say it’s a human at conception and make abortion illegal anyway. This logic allows us to assume any statement to be completely true even when we are all but certain it is not. I may just as easily say with certainty that I know the universe to be contained inside of a mayonnaise jar simply because I thought of this possibility. Even though we have no good reason to believe it, we have no absolute way to disprove it either, so I can happily make legal demands of others based on this assumption.

Not only do we thrust citizenship on what is essentially a clump of cells with no cognitive capacity whatsoever, but we also have surprisingly little in common with infants who have yet to develop the mental ability to interpret actions in a moral sense or to adequately sense their own status as a ‘self’. If we are to take this as the definition of what a human is, then we might be able to reasonably justify the treatment of infants or the mentally handicapped as akin to disposable animals, which would be an uncomfortable thing for many to consider. If we are to treat the prerequisites for basic rights as having the ability to sense the world to some degree at all, this seems to include all animal life, and we should therefore extend all rights we would give ourselves to animals (who cannot, as far as we know, interpret the rights they are given, and this might well be another sufficient requirement for the attainment of rights if one does not have a person to advocate for them). If we use the biological classification of the specific set of genes which form a human as being a human, this seems to allow for the inclusion of all life from sperm/egg all the way to dead skin cells. And men commit absolute genocide of sperm even if they successfully manage to impregnate their partners or if they merely unconsciously ejaculate in their sleep. So we ought to therefore give sperm equal human rights. I don’t think any society which grants this as factual would be able to function well at all.

Remaining arguments against abortion rely on our assumption that there is some natural evil quality to the act (or any action at all) and the discussion seems to come to a complete standstill as soon as you remove any naturally-existing objective morality from the picture. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of such a thing, so we are left with the option of disregarding such a concept when redesigning our societies in any intellectually honest fashion. To call the law into question for its inconsistency with so-called morality is to assume that even that morality has any basis. The law at least has some force of power enforcing it to make it legitimate, and it would seem that is about as good a starting place as any for identifying whatever our morals might be. However, there is a problem with this as many laws are brought about only through intuitive assumptions or the belief in antiquated perspectives on reality. While they may have legitimacy in their ability to be enforced, I would further argue that ultimately this *should not* be enough, even if it presently may be sufficient. So our laws, if we were to construct them reasonably, should eventually become strongly influenced not by feelings or comforting intuition, but by factual observations which disregard the possibility of some nonphysical world until such a thing can be sufficiently proven. The laws would not exist to uphold vague ideals, only to provide structure to a societal system which is functional and allows for the minimization of waste and the maximum benefit to those who participate in it as a whole. To determine what that might be will be a topic for another day.

The especially aggravating part is that even with the constitution as we have it in place, apparently states are fully able to establish laws based on nothing more than religious beliefs. For some reason it’s okay to widely interpret things in the constitution when it involves things conservatives want but not when it comes to separation of church and state, which again, I feel is too glossed over along with countless other things

Especially when they’re allowing the religious beliefs of a tribe which existed during a time when women were considered as objects and little more, something less than conscious beings perhaps.

I’m skeptical of giving basic rights to all humans (and only an enforced global government could effectively enforce such a thing to begin with) because it is too broad. This leaves it incredibly open to allow rights to people who simply are not compatible with the remainder of humanity or any sense of prosperity which might be able to allow rights. Allowing the opinions of people who cannot even rationally form said opinions to be respected and taken into account when making legal decisions is incredibly reckless, but is done all the time.

There should probably be a sort of incremental system of rights which limits them as people cause others’ rights to be increasingly hindered, ie through intentional coercion of others in a way which is blatantly manipulative or results in the unwilling transfer of property, benefits, or otherwise or of direct attacks on others who are legally granted these rights , the basis for minimizing these things being to minimize the needless suffering which comes from trauma inflicted on people and the spreading effects of these acts and attempting to repair them and also the reciprocal concept of empathy allowing any rights one might expect to be given to all others. Some intense thought would need to be given to nearly all actions we might consider crimes to determine if they are conducive to the prosperity of others or not. Ones which absolutely without any doubt inflict pain or misery on others would require harsher punishment. A corrections system which is focused on actual corrections instead of incarceration in a dedicated community of people who are effectively turned loose to attack one another and enact irrational power struggles among one another, effectively placing them in an environment in which infringement of rights of other prisoners is required to exist only because it is the norm.

To simplify, we cannot absolutely identify whether a developing fetus is an independent human or not, but even grown adult humans have no distinct value in themselves outside of that which we give to them. There is no sufficient reason to allow any entity any sort of inherent value. Abortion is medically considered to be the removal of what is effectively a body part from a woman’s body that she deems unwanted. And really until the child can speak for itself, there isn’t an awful lot of objective reason to prevent her from making the decision after it is separated from her body either, even though that notion seems intuitively wrong in many ways. That intuition is influenced, however, by a significant amount of cultural ideals which we have been exposed to. If the project to rethink these ideals is to be undertaken, then our interpretations of the morality of actions as based on such ideals are to be questioned just as seriously.

Some interesting additional readings:
http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/rochat/lab/fivelevels.pdf
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3351035/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4461833/
https://www.drrobertmelillo.com/research/2012-The-development-of-the-frontal-lobes-in-infancy-and-childhood-Asymmetry-and-the-nature-of-temperament-and-affect.pdf

Recent Journal Excerpts

Reflections on alienation and losing this game

I found myself today in an unusual state of bliss. I had to go to pick up my scripts from the pharmacy, which required an early morning visit to the commercial nightmare that is Wal-Mart. For some reason I found myself engaged in the activity not as a native, but as an interested yet disconnected observer of a place in which I was but a visitor. I saw myself as an outsider and felt immensely more comfortable for doing so. To embrace my situation as a foreign onlooker and participant of a culture alien to me gave me a sense of understanding that many of these people’s strange and backwards habits were appropriate, or at least understandable, rather than depressing.

It is unusual that I consider myself so foreign in my hometown. I know this place well from all my years here, yet it seems so arcane and unknown to me now. I feel no common connection with many of the people apart from our genetic commonalities as humans. But our cultural and intellectual practices seem wholly incompatible. I find this strangely comforting. To know that I am so unlike these people and to simply see myself as a visitor.

For now I play a game. The game has no set rules aside from those which are enforced in the arena by the officials and I seek to reform such rules to allow for a more interesting game rather than a rehash of the same one that has been played for ages. Chess is well and good, but to understand its faults and to correct them may only result in the greater game if these corrections are genuine.

I will die and upon this conclusion I expect nothing else. I am curious as to whether I am correct about this, but certainly not enough to attempt to explore such possibilities as of yet. There remain many alternatives to my supposed outcome, but they seem in complete conflict with all other rules which conscious agents like myself may adjust. Those are the important details which should influence our decisions regarding our own manufactured rules. We find our environment and as we learn more about it and adjust our understanding we adjust our rules for activity.

At present, the de facto laws of activity are enforced solely by physical force or threat of such by empowered groups. This leads quite often to wasteful conflict and unfortunate derailing of an overarching campaign to succeed in the game by those who would know better how to play. My personal analysis reveals a need to minimize such conflict and waste. To eliminate the potential for the game to end entirely for all involved and especially for those who might most strongly contribute to a greater and more intense participation in the proceedings. We are best served when a player is able to willingly end their own session after careful reflection and by no other means. The choice to end another’s session is a dire one indeed, and should not be taken lightly. A hazardously common practice of killing would seemingly allow for the ability to establish disproportionate and potentially stagnant power structures among groups. There ought to even be conflict among the most ingenious players who might ultimately agree on a potentially ideal endgame or sense of direction, but not on the means with which to achieve it. The synthesis of their disagreements is the stronger conclusion of such conflicts provided the end result is more beneficial and outweighs the losses required to obtain it. Resources are finite in this game, especially given our present limitations of space. But as our ability to expand the area of play and to navigate it strengthens, so might the totality of resources provided to us. Our current best course of action is to most efficiently utilize what we have access to until that point and to never expect any infinite source of power in a finite universe unless we have sufficient reason to do so.

We are fragile and require a very specific environment for play as the class of players we are and until we can manipulate the surroundings to suit our needs, we should understand that we are at their disposal as they are. It is in our interest to move in this direction and for all players to enhance their knowledge of the game as a whole. Smarter players allows for a greater game and a far richer experience overall. We should suspend from the table any who would seek to completely upend the game for the sake of pursuing something which is doubtfully probable in the confines of play or to teach them how to actually play given our understanding of the board. If they wish to play another game, so be it, but let them have their own fun in their own way without any expense to us who would experience this far more reasonable sport.

These other games of theirs require equipment which is non-existent, however. It may be reasonable to attempt to produce such objects, but not to act on them until the objects exist. We cannot play with a ball that is not there. We can with the one we have. We may seek the unknown ball, but may not use it until we have it in our hands, let alone see it at all. Keep with the rules which are consistent with one another and which harmonize. Be gone with those which bring nothing but conflict. The work must be done to justify their place within the scope of all others and players are often unwilling to do this work across a variety of playstyles. I would wish to establish a more neutral baseline of play and interpretation thereof. From there, we may begin to perhaps play without needless incompatible rulings to impede play. I stress that it is important to develop the anthropogenic rules on the backs of preexisting ones and to understand that our objective interpretation of such rules may at times require a total reform of all rules as needed in order to maintain a consistent system of play.